


You Find Me (Where I Can't Be Seen)

by glitteratiglue



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Angst, Backstory, F/F, Femslash, Romance, The Star Trek Femships 5K
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:25:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4030054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/pseuds/glitteratiglue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five moments in a life-changing relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Find Me (Where I Can't Be Seen)

**Author's Note:**

> Canon-ish.
> 
> ** Some non-graphic reference to torture. **

******1.**

It's all over, and Ro Laren is afraid. Bridge control is restored, the emergency bulkheads retracted and the whole crew is absorbed in the painstaking process of knitting their broken ship back together; it's a time for cautious celebration.

She is afraid.

Her head is pounding, the fear curling around her heart like wire, choking off every impulse of joy and relief – she is ashamed and it _hurts,_ because she never thought she was afraid to die, and she won't be like her father –

She is afraid, trapped in a quiet corner of the bridge with her face turned towards a screen she isn't reading. Her hands shake on the console, and she cannot move.

Suddenly, there is a hand covering hers – small and delicate and immaculately manicured – and it belongs to Deanna Troi. The calmness that accompanies that simple touch is like coming up for air, like the deepest breath before a plunge into dark, cold waters. She looks up and their eyes meet; there is clarity and understanding and not the slightest hint of pity in Troi's placid gaze.

Laren accepts the touch, doesn't look at her again – _can't_ look at this woman, who could have had her court-martialled for insubordination and is instead reaching out to her – and tries to breathe. She can't explain that attempting to exert power over others is the only way she knows how to operate. You were either tougher than those around you or you were winnowed out; it was the only way she survived those long years in the labour camps.

“Tell me, Ensign,” Troi is saying smoothly, as though they're having an ordinary conversation, “how long will it be until the main phaser array is fully operational?”

A glance tells her Troi has moved so the two of them can't easily be seen by any others; her body blocks their little corner out. She taps out the familiar commands and repeats facts she and the counselor both know already, and then Troi thinks of more pointless questions for her to ask the computer.

Later, Laren will remember that she was not afraid to die; she was afraid of dying and meaning nothing to anyone, of being inconsequential in this world.

 

**2.**

It's the middle of the ship's night cycle, and the quiet roars in her ears. She is due on Alpha shift in four hours and instead of sleeping, she finds her way to Deanna Troi's office.

She presses the door chime – something inside her soars when the doors open – and it turns out that she isn't the only insomniac on the ship. The counselor is seated cross-legged on her office floor, surrounded by a stack of PADDs.

"Ensign Ro!" Deanna rises to her feet, tired but smiling in a nightgown with her hair loose over her shoulders, and Laren feels instantly vulnerable, every piece of her sharp façade cracking beneath the counselor's soft gaze. "Come and sit down. Is there anything in particular that brings you here?"

Laren offers a feeble explanation: “I don't sleep.” It should be _can't sleep_ , she thinks while the counselor motions for her to sit and goes to the replicator to make two cups of a chocolatey drink that smells spicy and intoxicating. "I don't really want to talk about it, though," she adds quickly.

Deanna nods in assent, passes her the cup of hot chocolate and sits down.

Laren knows all too well why she rarely has a night of unbroken sleep – it's because she is living on borrowed time. She isn't supposed to be there. The Cardassians taught Ro Laren that what is given with one hand can be taken away with the other, and she is always only one rank pip and one flimsy letter of recommendation away from losing everything. One day she will screw up again, and her freedom will be gone.

She starts as fingers rake across her scalp.

“Betazoid pressure points. It'll relax you. Trust me.” The words are breathed in her ear and as Deanna leans in, one of her curls inadvertently brushes her skin. Laren has a sudden longing to touch that soft hair.

Her eyes are closed, she is drinking the sweet, rich drink and Deanna's careful fingers are in her hair; she feels better than she has in ages.

“Why are you still up?” Laren asks – stupidly, because she already knows the answer, knows that their strong Klingon security chief is lying in sickbay, a new spine sewn beneath his skin, and that there's a frightened little boy somewhere who has been relying on the ship's counselor to hold him together.

Deanna's eyes are guarded; she sips her hot chocolate before she answers. “Klingon emotions are powerful, even from a half-Klingon. Sometimes it's a little much for me. Alexander is asleep in my quarters and Will's keeping an eye from next door; he's been so afraid he would lose his father and his dreams were so vivid I -” The counselor's eyes close for an instant and she breathes deep, opens her eyes and the bright mask comes down again.

Laren takes a cautious sip of her beverage. “Mmm, this is really good.”

“I'll have to make it again for you.”

Laren grants her a rare smile.

Deanna reaches for the console controls. “It's a bit late for work now,” she observes, scowling at the PADDs at her feet. “How about a holovid to pass the time? I've discovered these wonderfully quaint twentieth-century ones about Earth's Ancient West in the Federation's cultural archives. Will always makes me watch the ones with someone called John Wayne in, but I don't think much of those..." She scrolls through the database, her brow furrowed.

“Sure.” Laren wonders what other strange interests the counselor has.

“Oh, I like this one!” Deanna is instantly animated, recognition shining in her eyes. “ _Calamity Jane._ I used to be able to sing all the songs.”

The puzzled expression on her companion's face compels her to explain.

“My father loved the Ancient West,” says Deanna, and a sadness reaches her eyes that touches Laren in the deepest place inside her. “He died when I was young.”

Laren wants to say something, but then she remembers as ship's counselor, Deanna has read her personnel file and she _knows._ Tentatively, she links her fingers into Deanna's and they watch the entirely bizarre tale of saloon towns and stagecoaches, complete with jaunty musical numbers that have her smiling in spite of herself. Deanna hums along to the songs and never takes her fingers from hers.

 

**3.**

She is back from the dead, a half-life where she still breathed and thought and spoke, but almost no-one heard. Geordi is still in Ten Forward sampling some of the delights they ordered from the replicator; she excused herself some time ago. Her skin crawls, still tender from the effects of the phased cloak, and her head is killing her.

She is alive, but she does not feel it.

The chime buzzes. This time it is Deanna at her door – too late for a social call – breathless and agitated as she stands on the doorstep.

“Is it too late?” she is asking shyly, and Laren knows that she doesn't mean the hour, that it's a statement loaded with meaning and touches that have never been explained in all their quiet moments together in the dead of night. Confident, professional Lieutenant Commander Troi is standing there with wild eyes, shaking with everything they are both thinking but can't say.

Laren stops thinking.

She takes the outstretched hand, pulls her inside and Deanna kisses her with soft lips and gentle hands stroking through her hair. The counselor is deft and careful and Laren gets over her shock in time to kiss back, opening her mouth a little; the kiss becomes hot, wet and she's burning up beneath her skin already, a conflagration of nerve endings firing all at once.

Her head is spinning, somewhere outside of her body as she they find zips and buckles and unfasten them, pressing kisses to bared, heated skin as they go. They step closer, Deanna's breasts press to hers and it's searingly hot in a way that makes her breath catch. 

“Should have warned you; Betazoid body temperatures run a little hotter.” Deanna's smile is wicked as she steps out of her jumpsuit, leaving her entirely naked and unashamed. Laren wants to touch everywhere, and she can hardly breathe –

Fierce, the look in Deanna's eyes as Laren steps forward and touches that long hair, twisting the curls round her fingers, pulling her in for another kiss that makes tingling warmth flare between her thighs. Deanna walks her backwards until there are expensive satin sheets under her back, cool and slippery.

There's a hot, teasing scrape of teeth on Laren's neck and she moans, arches her back. Warm fingers cup her breast, and slip lower, finding all the places that make her shudder along the way.

“Breathe, Laren.” Deanna's smile is gentle as she dips her head to lay a bite on the inside of Laren's thigh that makes her cry out with need. Then her mouth is there, all softness and heat, and every part of Laren is liquid, falling to pieces as she climbs higher and higher, and Deanna's tongue is doing something she has never even heard of, and _oh, oh –_

_please (_ she isn't sure whether she's screaming it out loud or in her head) –

Her fingers are in Deanna's hair, pulling hard, and the soft, steady pressure between her legs doesn't stop –

Laren breaks, coming white-hot and hard, gasping and shaking through her release. Deanna licks her softly through every tremor, until every last inch of pleasure has been wrung out of her, laughing as she draws back to rest her head on her thigh.

With a shaky grin, Laren shifts down the bed, slips a thigh between Deanna's legs and pushes, just once, enjoying the way the other woman moans and her eyes fall shut. She reaches up to pinch at Deanna's nipple, dark and taut, and the way she cries out is beautiful.

Running hands over the flat stomach before her to feel the burning-hot skin, Laren drags her fingers through dark curls to find the slickness below. She makes gentle circles above and to the side of Deanna's clit and starts up a slow rhythm, feeling the way the unfamiliar thighs tense around her hand, listening for the soft cries that tell her she's in the right spot.

Before long, she has her companion gasping and clutching at the sheets, every breath escaping her in sharp bursts. Laren presses harder with her fingertips, rubs faster when she screams until Deanna shatters, coming apart with a soft cry of her name.

Laren feels daring, unstoppable and so _alive._ “I love you, Deanna.”

Deanna is radiant, all softly-flushed skin and tangled hair stretched out on the sheets, and a tear glistens at the corner of her eye. “And I love you.”

Laren lets the words sink in and fill up all the empty places inside her that have always ached so deeply, until now. She reaches for Deanna and kisses her, giddy and breathless and full of possibility and joy.

She is not afraid to die. She is living.  _  
_

 

**4.**

After weeks apart, they are in her quarters, sitting on the bed and reading side-by-side. The bright burst of being with this woman – of feeling and loving Deanna again after all that time of not being able to even contact her on subspace – is muted by the very real terror Laren feels, beating against her chest like a hummingbird's wings.

She is not afraid to die.

Deanna has tactfully said nothing and not pressed the issue – after all, it's her job to know what people are thinking – but she can see the void inside Laren, sense the way she is open and broken and wrecked. She does not speak to her, but she never leaves her side.

This is her own fault, thinks Laren. She pushed Jean-Luc to recommend her for Advanced Tactical Training, even when her psych profile got her failed the first time. He told her she had better be up to it, and she realised why on the first day. The tactical training is a smokescreen; you are trained to be an infiltrator, a body of silence and shadows and darkness who moves where no-one else can. You sign a release to keep the details secret, and that secret is a heavy burden on her shoulders, one she cannot even tell the person that she loves.

That night, with Deanna's soft arms wrapped around her waist, Laren dreams of it.

The instructors explain it is not for the faint-hearted, that they chosen few will be trained to resist torture, forced to confront their worst fears so they cannot be used against them in the event of capture. They show her images of the toxic bombs dropped on Bajor, and she remembers the skies turning orange, the birdsong falling silent while their crops were scorched and the earth poisoned. She does not react; they don't know that isn't her worst fear.

She is not afraid to die.

Ten of the fifteen recruits wash out by the fourth day. When she is thrown in a cell, shivering and cold and without water or food for three days, all she can think is that it beats the whippings and whole weeks without food that were standard in the Cardassian labour camps she spent her childhood in. The simulated interrogations are nothing; she endures them with a plastered-on smile and does what she always used to do – separates herself from the pain and pretends she is somewhere else. She does not break.

Here, she is not Ro Laren. She does not exist. Lies and deceit were second nature to her in her old life, before she put on this uniform of light fabric that sometimes weighs so heavily on her. Her file is stamped and they tell her she has passed with distinction. She laughs hysterically until she almost cries and the review board exchange looks that suggest they think she's crazy.

The first place Laren goes to after is the _Enterprise-D's_ hair salon. Her locks are shorn close to her head and dyed black as a raven's wing – it seems frivolous, but it is more than it seems; it is a way of keeping a part of herself close, a way to remind herself that there is something real inside her that no-one else can touch.

The captain greets her warmly upon her return, and her smile is brittle and all she can think is: _you made me an instrument. You think I am nothing._

Now she is awake, sobbing and crying and gasping and Deanna is stroking her hair and holding her so tightly it hurts.

Her worst fear is forgetting who she is and where she comes from. She is a Bajoran, and a survivor.

Laren gets up and searches the console for the belaklavion piece her father used to play – the kind, loving man she has denounced as a weak, sniveling coward on so many occasions. Notes she hasn't heard in more than twenty years fill her ears, and the tears roll down her cheeks, leaving her hot and angry and ashamed.

“It's beautiful.” Deanna is there, winding arms around her, holding her close, and Laren is so grateful for her that it aches.

_I know what this means to you_ , says Deanna without speaking, inside her mind and wrapped around her body in a way that makes her feel so complete.

“I'm sorry,” she says against Deanna's lips, and she can say no more.

Her heart breaks and heals at the same time.

 

**5.**

She is not afraid to die.

Before Deanna, she was afraid to _live._

Laren measures every heartbeat as the shuttlecraft inches closer to the nebula. She will do this, and ignore the pain in her heart that weakens her resolve with every moment that passes. She will do this because she has to; it is a chance to atone for everything she is not proud of, and to honour the bravery of her father, of Macias and all those who died so that she could live.

There's a voice in her mind, and it can't be Deanna – she's too far – but somehow it is her voice, clear as a bell, warm and accepting.

_It's okay. Don't be afraid._

With those words, Laren comes back to herself and points the phaser at Will, leaving all her regrets behind.

She leaves her fear behind, too. As she transports away moments later, she lets her heart fill up with all the wonderful completeness and joy it is capable of, and she is not afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> For the Star Trek Femships 5K. Some more stories about these two to come!
> 
> Title from the beautiful song _Falling_ by Kate Rusby.


End file.
